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exaggeration to attract papal support for a new religious foundation. The specification of the cemetery for the use of peregrinorum could lie at the heart of this – if the city population was sufficiently bloated by refugees from the surrounding counties, we could entertain such carnage without direct reference to static population estimates for residents alone. Third, we nonetheless acknowledge that while the figures are confused, subject to some change across the later decades of the fourteenth century, they were honoured in an unusual and permanent manner suggesting something quite unique. So fourth, while the figures of 50,000 or 60,000 (equal to up to 100 per cent of our suggested resident population) in one cemetery appears entirely implausible, and while such ‘rounded’ numbers are often used as a cipher for ‘a very large number’ in medieval texts, the possibility must be entertained that many thousands, perhaps over 20,000, buried victims still lie somewhere underneath the green spaces of Charterhouse Square and the Charterhouse itself. This is a figure far in excess of previous estimates. 313
    Remarkably, Londoners themselves only ever mention the impact of the plague on the city once in surviving documents. In April 1357, seven years after the event, they petitioned the king for relief from taxation in recognition of the huge sums that the city had lent him to fund his military campaigns in Scotland and France. In the petition they stated that, ‘whereas by reason of the death of the richer inhabitants of the City at the time of the pestilence, and their property having fallen into the hand of Holy Church, the City had become impoverished and more than one-third of it empty’. 314 While it is obvious that it would have benefited the civic authorities to enhance any claims of poverty, such a claim as this could quite easily have been checked or challenged – the king’s systems for taxation had proved effective at determining who could afford levies such as that of 1346, and the effects of abandonment should have been quite visible – but it was not. If more than one-third of the city was empty in 1357, despite the opportunities provided by seven years of recovery and immigration, the scale of the depopulation could only have been greater. Some evidence of this may exist. Of the ten tenements mentioned as paying for the maintenance of the Great Conduit in Cheapside, when the two-yearly accounts were delivered in November 1350, three were specifically described as empty, and four of the remainder paid rent during 1348–9 only. Just three were accounted as having returned a rent in the second year (from October 1349 to October 1350). 315
    If more than a third of the city property was indeed empty, the death toll implied is at least equal as a percentage, but probably very much higher, since it would not account for families in other tenements who were reduced but not eradicated by the plague. The smaller villages outside the city were equally badly affected. In the manor and village of Kingsbury, a few miles north-west of the city, there were twelve holdings in the early fourteenth century. In 1350 the manor court learned of the deaths of thirteen people ‘at the time of the pestilence’; the holdings were divided among the few survivors, leaving the excess properties empty. 316
    Some later reports managed to exaggerate the impact quite wonderfully. An Icelandic annal of c . 1430 claimed that only fourteen persons survived in London after the Great Pestilence of 1349. 317 Written, perhaps, for narrative impact, it is also conceivable that the annal confused general mortality with that among the city’s ‘ruling’ body of the mayor and aldermen of whom there were normally twenty-four. Eight aldermen definitely or probably died during the pestilence, and eighteen were in office at some point during 1349. 318 The overlap caused by new aldermen replacing plague victims is not clear, but the numbers would